Whose Culture is This and Does Anybody Know?

Though I've always been aware and conscious of the fact that anything put on the internet is findable, there's always been a certain sense of privacy for me here on Tumblr--I never advertised the fact I was on Tumblr, or used it as heavily as I did, and I've let myself just kind of run free with it. It was great for the years that I felt like I had nothing else going on in my life outside of the friends I'd made through music and being a fan of music itself. When you don't really have friends or much going on in your life that relies on other "real" people, you build a world for yourself somewhere else. In my case, it was on the internet with respect to my fandoms and the people I'd met with common interests. That pretty much entertained me for 5 years when I didn't have a lot else going on. 

But in the past year and a half, my life has drastically changed, and I DO have friends that I see day in and day out, and I DO have a significant life outside of the music/movies/TV shows/etc that I usually concerned myself with. And sometimes I chose to write about that life. And sometimes I said too much, even though I tried to keep it general and non-specific. 

What has happened is that someone I care about very much, perhaps more than I've ever cared for another person, found this blog and read it, and found things about them that made them feel confused and exposed and judged. And though I only ever meant the absolute best, as I love this person very much, I should know better than to think putting something online is ever a "safe" thing to do when it's about someone else, especially if you're a long-winded blabbermouth like me. You'd think I'd have had that reality check long before I was 24 years old, that keeping a written record of things online was a silly thing to do. But passion and loneliness and a desire to write things down for posterity all snowball into a longtime habit of simply Saying Too Much. I think I've been Saying Too Much since about 2007, when I first started to not have a life and took to the internet. 

So, it's been a week. I've been perhaps disproportionately guilty, embarrassed, upset, and worried that I've ruined a friendship that meant everything to me. All signs point to growing past it, but that doesn't mean I'm over being embarrassed or feeling like an idiot (and I'll always own exactly who I am, but all the fangirliness is a bit mortifying to have someone you love read that previously didn't know how insane you really were). I will always feel bad for hurting a friend, even if my intentions were always good. You can't control how someone interprets something, even if it all came from a place of love. And therein lies the reason I sometimes just don't bother to communicate at all: I feel like I try very hard to find the best, clearest way to say what I mean, but you can never predict how someone else is going to interpret it. And it may hurt them. I'm still terrified I ruined the best thing I had going for me in the past year, though I've been told not to worry so much. Maybe I'm overreacting, but I've spent a lot of time crying. I feel like I've never felt this bad about something, but I guess that's just a testament to how much I really care about this friendship. 

I don't know what this means for the future of this blog, or me on Tumblr. Even though I'm like, afraid of all social networking for the time being and especially of this website, I do not want to delete this blog. I've had it for too long, there are too many things I like on it to take it down completely and have it scrubbed from the record. It's still me, even if it's a bit embarrassing and I regret parts of it. And I still love following all of you and scrolling through my dash and staying in touch that way. I just don't know if I'll ever really use this blog much again. Maybe. Maybe I just need to get over myself and I'll come back, just with less information about my life and the people in it. Maybe I'll slowly work back and privatize the text posts. 

For now: I'm keeping this URL because it's not linked to anything and it's harder to find. I might leave the two other blogs I've contributed to--I have to think about it. And I might make my homepage redirect to something else just to avoid anything happening again. But I don't want it to go away forever. Until Tumblr makes an export tool or allows you to lock the main blog on your account, I'm just going to keep my head down because I may have quickly learned a valuable lesson about the internet and about privacy, but I still need to watch myself and figure out what that means for how I interact in the future. I either say too much or nothing at all, and for now the latter feels like the better course of action. So there's going to be some radio silence for awhile at least.